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1

Constructive Distance: Nicole Krauss’s “Great House” as a Model for Third-Generation Holocaust Fiction

100%

Strakosch A.

Jednak Książki. Gdańskie Czasopismo Humanistyczne

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2016

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issue 6 "The Holocaust and the Contemporary World"

173-186

EN

As the final Holocaust survivors pass, the urgent task of representing the atrocity in order to keep its memory alive passes to later generations. In the past ten to fifteen years, the third generation (defined here as the grandchildren of survivors) have begun producing inventive and celebrated works of literature that explore the Holocaust from a unique position of generational distance. While psychoanalytic theory has started examining the impact of inherited trauma on the third generation, there is currently little scholarship on the unique characteristics of third-generation fiction and the position from which it is written. As an author whose Jewish grandfather survived the Holocaust, I would suggest that the ethics of representing the atrocity poses particular challenges and opportunities for the third-generation writer. Authors of this generation face a unique ethical conundrum, I argue, in that they are simultaneously connected to and twice -distanced from the event they seek to explore. In this paper, I adapt Marianne Hirsch’s notion of second-generation postmemory to consider a particular third-generation novel, Nicole Krauss’s Great House. I suggest that Krauss’s text is ethically valid not despite but because of its author’s generational distance from the Holocaust. Krauss uses distancing techniques in the structure and content of her novel to highlight her twice-mediated knowledge of the atrocity. By drawing attention to her remoteness from the Holocaust, Krauss enables readers to compare their own dormant knowledge of the atrocity against the version being presented in the text. In this way, she leads readers away from a passive or complacent reading of history towards a more active one. Krauss’s model suggests that the post-generation author’s inevitable distance from the Holocaust is in fact a necessary and productive ingredient of contemporary Holocaust fiction.

2

The Problem of Kitsch in the Context of Holocaust Fiction: Jonathan Littell and Bernhard Schlink

88%

Ghita R., Ghita C.

Jednak Książki. Gdańskie Czasopismo Humanistyczne

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2016

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issue 6 "The Holocaust and the Contemporary World"

107-124

EN

This paper aims to discuss the problem of kitsch within a broader framework encompassing the issues and limits of representation in the case of fictional works dealing with concentration camp trauma. Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader (Der Vorleser, 1995) and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes, 2006) have both achieved international acclaim yet also sparked a huge scandal mainly for their narrative choice of embracing the (controversial) point of view of the perpetrator. Some of the harshest critics in Germany have issued condemnations on grounds of kitsch, lack of aesthetic value and moral relativism; even the term ‘Holo-kitsch’ was coined. Yet the label ‘kitsch’ was attached by some voices even to The Hunger Angel (Schaukelatem, 2009), a totally different kind of novel depicting horrendous events in a Soviet concentration camp from the perspective of a Romanian German deported to Ukraine. This is a work of fiction belonging to a Nobel prize laureate famous for her difficult metaphoric style, Herta Müller, and rooted in the poetic prose of German Expressionism. We would like to outline the main points of the debate, drawing both on reception data and on scholarly papers, whilst investigating the various (and often fuzzy) assumptions which seem to be related to the kitsch-concept within the context of Holocaust/Gulag fiction, for example, the extent to which it implies a negative value judgement from an aesthetic perspective and/or an ethically grounded uneasiness about trespassing moral limits of representation.

3

Deathfugue and the Maidens: The Intertextual Bonds Between Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” and Cynthia Ozick’s "The Shawl" Re-Considered

75%

Partyka J.

Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny

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2018

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issue 2

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2 Jednak Książki. Gdańskie Czasopismo Humanistyczne

1 Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny

1 Ghita C.

1 Ghita R.

1 Partyka J.

1 Strakosch A.

1 2018

2 2016

Constructive Distance: Nicole Krauss’s “Great House” as a Model for Third-Generation Holocaust Fiction

The Problem of Kitsch in the Context of Holocaust Fiction: Jonathan Littell and Bernhard Schlink

Deathfugue and the Maidens: The Intertextual Bonds Between Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” and Cynthia Ozick’s "The Shawl" Re-Considered